10 Percent of UK Sites Incompatible with Firefox

Bimo_Dude writes "The BBC News is reporting that ten percent of UK websites alienate Firefox users. From the article: 'While most people still use Microsoft's browser, Firefox is slowly making inroads. Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications. Microsoft IE's share of the market dropped to 87.23% in May, compared to 90.31% in January.'"

Comments

Books suggest designing for IE only

[acomj]

My GF picked up a book on CSS (for dummies). The author suggested that standards didn't matter so much as the market was pretty much all internet explorer, so why bother checking with any other browser.

I couldn't beleive I was reading this. Its actually repeated in a different section of the book. But then again the book was for dummies.

For what its worth firefox plugins like webdeveloper make designing/checking web pages (especially css) so much easier, hopefully it will make traction into web development shops.

IE only sites

[DeadSea]

Are sites IE only because IE has features that firefox does not, or because developers are lazy and don't check in multiple browsers.

In the later case, of developing in IE, and not checking with Firefox, does anybody know what the most common things that break are?

In the IE features category, I have seen one thing that IE does really well that Firefox does not do: Image transition filters such as the fade in/out effect when you switch photos. Are there other things the you as a developer want, but are only implemented in IE?

I know on the other side, that I want rounded corners on divs and alpha transparency in pngs to be properly implemented in IE.

Easy standards for those who are "not so stupid"

[standards]

Firefox is slowly making inroads. Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications.

That may be true over all, but in my world (a large site primarily attracting the 18 - 29 year old demographic within the US) we see something different: FireFox (16%) and Safari (5%).

We have a small development shop (5 developers), but we find it extremely easy to build and deploy a sophisticated web user interface that is compatible with IE, Mozilla + varients, Safari, Opera, Konqueor, and more.

The "trick", if you want to call it that, is to reuse good UI code. Such a strategy saves us time and money, and keeps us lean and keeps us (at least usability-wise) well ahead of the competition. Oh, and we also support accessibility standards.

I have a feeling that we do it well because most all of our developers are professionals - they didn't just "stumble into the webmaster job by creating a webpage".

Anyhow, just as well - our competitors' sites look and work like crap.

I remember when a competitor's site crapped out was broken for weeks when a new version of IE was released... they had many versions of their UI code splattered throughout their site - I feel bad for the people that have to deal with all that crap.